ohmidog!

“The Big Chill for the AARP set.”

“Too much people and not enough dog.”

“A dog of a flick.”

Lawrence Kasdan’s new movie, Darling Companion, isn’t receiving universal acclaim.

A movie about a lost dog rescued from the side of the road, some critics are saying it goes astray, despite a cast that includes Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline and, in the starring role — though not starring enough, some say – a mutt who plays the character of a dog named Freeway.

“…Aimless, tedious and sometimes downright ridiculous,” is how it’s reviewed on Movieline, where a critic pointed out it would have benefited from focusing more on the dog, less on the bickering family.

Written by Kasdan and his wife, Meg Kasdan, the script for Darling Companion involves a dog rescued and then lost. Freeway disappears while chasing after a deer. The plot centers on the search for the dog, but apparently gets sidetracked a lot with strictly human angst, both related and unrelated to the dog’s disappearance.

The movie was made on a small budget, and is Kasdan’s first independent film. It has some parallels to the Kasdan’s loss of their own dog, Mac, a dog they adopted from a shelter and lost about five years ago,” Steve Dale reports in the Chicago Tribune

“While attending a wedding, we left Mac with a friend,” Kasdan said. “They were hiking when a mountain biker spooked the dog and he ran off. We thought he’d show up immediately. We searched and searched and put up posters and made announcements on local radio. We did everything.”

“I learned it’s one of the most emotional things that can happen,” he said. The dog was recovered four weeks later.

The movie also draws from an experience of Meg Kasdan’s sister, who rescued a dog from the side of the road in Detroit, and named it Freeway.